Small enterprises strive to survive and grow in the business they are involved. They make efforts to utilize different resources and technologies available to this end as long as it is affordable and productive. Information Communication Technology or e-commerce are among those technologies that take the front line. This paper aims to define an adoption level of e-commerce in small Ethiopian enterprises and show that their business requirements and perceived benefits of e-commerce are related to business growth. It takes five small enterprises involved in import and export business to perform case study research on the issue and examines their utilization level of the technology. The findings show that small enterprises in the country have low levels of e-commerce utilization due to: (1) the scarcity of infrastructure development and expertise in the area, and (2) barriers created by government policy and bank regulations. However, this study found good understanding of the business opportunities and benefits that could be exploited from e-commerce.

2. Putting a MOOC for Human Rights in the Hands of Kenyans

Jobe, William

et al.

University West, Department of Economics and IT, Divison of Informatics.

The research goal of this project was to explore the use and effects of non-formal education and incentives in the context of a developing country. The practical aim of this project was to create, implement, and evaluate a platform about human rights that was available to any Kenyan for free in order to increase knowledge and engagement. Therefore, a non-formal massive open online course (MOOC) about human rights was designed and launched. The course was free and open to anyone in Kenya and offered both a digital badge and certificate from Stockholm University in Sweden upon completion. The course was called Haki Zangu (Kiswahili for "My Rights"), and it explored how using incentives such as a digital badge and certificate of completion affected learning outcomes. This course offered ubiquitous access based on principles of responsive web design and used audio recordings of the entire course content. The course is perpetual and still on-going, but after six months there were 160 participants who had enrolled, and ten participants had completed the course and received certificates and digital badges. The participants showed extensive enthusiasm and engagement for human rights issues, and they expressed desires to learn more and further spread knowledge about human rights. The current findings suggest that the availability of digital badges and certificates increased interest for participation and positively affected learning outcomes. Moreover, the use of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) format with incentives proved successful, combined with the contextualization and accessibility of the course content. Furthermore, the technical platform proved adequate for disseminating education for free in a developing country, and allowed for unencumbered access regardless of device. Lastly, a key challenge for future non-formal learning efforts in developing countries is the cost of Internet access.